Best zoo would have fewer animals

Bamboo, one of Woodland Park's most challenging creatures, had grown up at the zoo without other elephants, so she was an independent loner.

I hurried down the zoo's road leading to the secluded elephant forest. But I passed the trail curving to the elephant barn and turned toward a secluded overlook. If Bamboo was at the far end of the elephant yard, she already knew I was coming. Elephants don't see well, but their other senses are acute.

She was there, standing quietly beside the fence in a clearing surrounded by trees and silence. I said, "So you're early, too."

She didn't move, but she studied me through the world's longest eyelashes.

"How are you, Bamboo?"

One ear twitched, perhaps because she heard her name. She extended her trunk, then dropped it, to turn a pebble over at her feet. Was she showing it to me?

I had come prepared to entertain her. Once I had discovered that a Green Lake swan paid attention when I whistled the first notes of Debussy's "Clair de lune."

Now I whistled for Bamboo.

Ear twitch. Foot shuffle.

I whistled again. She moved closer to the fence, extending her trunk toward me curiously. Who? What? Oh. It's only her.

Bamboo found a few blades of new grass sticking through the fence. She pulled them up daintily and tucked them into her mouth.

I enjoyed speculating on her thoughts, but I knew better.

Even an animal that had grown up alone with humans didn't have human thoughts -- or so I had been warned. Animals are only animals. They don't think like us. That implies they don't matter.

Bamboo and I spent half an hour on opposite sides of a line I wished I could cross. She tolerated familiar human contact.

Perhaps some day ... I rested one hand on the fence.

Suddenly Bamboo turned a little. Gentle Chai, another Asian elephant, trundled curiously around a corner toward me. But Bamboo moved away and crossed to the other side of the clearing.

Her deep rumbling voice vibrated in the rail under my hand.

Then I saw why she moved. Watoto, the African elephant, lunged toward Bamboo, swinging her trunk and tossing her head.

Those tusks! My heart thudded. Watoto didn't like Bamboo, and sometimes she hurt her. Bamboo tried to escape, moving as close to a run as elephants ever do.

I shouted at Watoto. She slowed her rush, and Bamboo disappeared around the corner.

I was ready to cry. Poor Bamboo, always left out, always the one who couldn't claim friendship -- because she had never learned how. She and every other herd animal raised alone lacks the ability to socialize with her own kind. We, selfish zoo lovers, created this problem because we want to see animals even if they don't want to see us.

"I won't whistle for you," I told Watoto childishly. As if Watoto cared, I thought. She didn't need me -- or Bamboo.

Later I found Bamboo in the barn alone, standing still, perhaps napping. Perhaps half dreaming of the forests her grandmothers knew on the other side of the world, forever lost to her. Our fault.

What if she could live alone in the far end of the elephant yard? Or in another place in the elephant forest? What if money were spent on making a secure place for a creature that had earned so much money for the zoo for so many years?

What if we all thought of zoos differently? We are meant to be educated in modern zoos, but what if we gave our attention to fewer animals with even more natural exhibits? What if children were not encouraged to think of zoos as entertainment, but instead as generous places where we learn more about just a few of the creatures whose lives we cruelly interrupted?

Bamboo, we must find a place for you in the only home you've ever known.